IN PRAISE OF CHARLIE KAUFMAN

Charlie Kaufman “Synecdoche, New York” Charlie Kaufman is the only current Hollywood screenwriter who is as famous as any of the directors he’s worked with. Even when those directors are as idiosyncratic as Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry, Kaufman’s vision is so eccentric and original that he always leaves a deeper and stranger impression on his films than his collaborators do.

Think of “Being John Malkovich”, with its office on Floor Seven and a Half, or “Adaptation”, with a hero who happens to be a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman. Even the title of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is so unwieldy that anyone else would have scrapped it.

Kaufman’s first film as both director and writer is weirder than all his previous high-concept comedies put together. “Synecdoche, New York”, which opens in Britain on May 15th, is a surreal, spiralling meditation on loneliness, illness, ageing and art, although it’s also a lot funnier than that might suggest. Beyond saying that it stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a hypochondriac theatre director with a questionable grip on reality, and Michelle Williams as his wife, any plot summary would be pointless. It’ll leave some viewers cold, others ecstatic, and all of them certain that they’ve seen something unmistakably Kaufmanesque.

~ NICHOLAS BARBER

Synecdoche, New York British opening May 15th

Picture Credit: ^Berd (via Flickr)